


Not Your Robin

by echoist



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banter, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s03e03 Fireflies, Fluff, M/M, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-19
Updated: 2013-06-19
Packaged: 2017-12-15 11:25:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/848999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoist/pseuds/echoist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It takes Derek a moment, but he realizes that this is what Stiles <i>does</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Not Your Robin

There's a frantic knock at Derek's door, and it's Stiles, he knows it's Stiles before even opening the door because his heartbeat is fluttering nervously and the entire hallway _smells_ like Stiles. The kid pushes the door to the loft open as soon as Derek turns the lock, barging his way in as usual.

'Why are you here?' Derek asks in the early morning light streaming in through the filthy windows.

'I have something you might want to know,' Stiles says, glancing around. 'Also because Scott called me,' Stiles continues, tilting his head as if to say _of course_. 'He said you got Boyd and Cora cornered and you held them both off long enough to save Ms. Blake and if you held off two moon-crazed wolves, I thought they'd have torn you to shreds and - ' He glances down at the oversized Medical Kit clutched in his hands.

'Right,' Stiles continues in the loaded silence. 'I'm an idiot. Of course they tore you to shreds, and now, thirty minutes later, you're completely fine.'

'You're not an idiot, Derek mutters, shutting the door behind him.

'So where are they?' Stiles asks more quietly. 'Do you have them tucked safe in bed upstairs in the Hale Home For Wayward Wolves?'

'They're resting,' Derek nods, not even bothering to correct Stiles' hyperbole. He's used to it.

'Jesus,' Stiles breathes, looking Derek up and down for injuries while steadfastly _not_ trying to look him up and down. 'What did they do to you?

'What any beta would have done who hadn't seen the moon in three months, and had the bad luck to get cornered with me in a school basement.' Derek shrugs.

'There are more holes in your shirt than, you know, shirt.' Stiles says, his lips turning down at the corners. 'And is all that blood? Is that your blood?'

Derek sighs. 'Yes, Stiles, it's probably all my blood. I was trying not to hurt them.'

Stiles sets the Emergency Kit down awkwardly on the table and leans against the solidity of four-legged steel. 'Look, I know you don't need any help, ok, I _know_ that, it's just that Scott called me and I recognize trouble when I hear it.' He glances up at the beams of light selectively illuminating the room. 'I think I actually can smell trouble coming at this point, thanks to you,' he adds, not even trying to crack a joke. 'I didn't stop to – I wasn't thinking. Sorry to bother you.'

Derek hears a hitch in Stiles' heartbeat and turns toward him, leaning his left hip against the table and picking up a mug of coffee in his right hand. 'There was a _lot_ of trouble tonight. Good people could have lost their lives, because of me.'

'Because of us,' Stiles insists. 'It was our plan, and we screwed up.'

'We didn't have all the information,' Derek deflects. 'No one in their right mind would have known that an abandoned bank vault downtown could have kept out the moon with some kind of designer granite, ok?'

'Hecatolite,' Stiles corrects him automatically. 'Also known to the uninformed as moonstone, which is not granite, it's a formational _component_ of granite called feldspar, and not to mention utterly ridiculous for lining your collection of money, unless you happen to be Jay Gatsby or Scrooge McDuck. That installation was notcheap by the way, and I'm betting we could probably find records on - '

Derek fixes him with that look that he's supposed to recognize as 'Stop talking now, Stiles,' and to be fair he considers it, really, he does.

'Besides,' Stiles goes on anyway. 'You know I'm not exactly in my right mind, I mean I spend my spare time running track so I can better flee crime scenes, and helping _werewolves_ solve mysteries like I'm the Sam Spade of the supernatural. It's my job to know this shit, and I didn't, and that's why tonight happened in the first place.'

Derek bites down on his tongue and doesn't even start in on that one. 'How's the hand, by the way?' he asks casually instead, looking at a blank slate of wall across the room, and in the corner of his vision, Stiles just shrugs.

'Healing at a normal rate. As human do.' Derek scuffs one foot across the floor, and Stiles notices a patch of red spreading across his arm. 'That's blood,' he says, opening the kit.

'You just said that,' Derek throws back, rolling his eyes.

'No, that's fresh blood, on your left shoulder,' Stiles corrects, tearing open an antiseptic wipe and popping the lid off a tube of triple antibiotic ointment that Derek absolutely, in no way needs. He reaches out and pulls up the sleeve of Derek's nightmare of a t-shirt, and shows him three claw marks that are still oozing thick, half-clotted steams of red from savage rips across the skin.

'Can I just -' Stiles begins, uncertain, medical supplies held awkwardly between his fingers. 'My hands are clean, I swear, I just washed them.'

Derek takes in a deep breath, more of a heave, really, and glances towards the morning sun streaming in through the windows. He watches tiny motes of dust float through them to settle in comfortably against the floor and scattered furniture. 'Would it make you feel better to put a band-aid on my arm?' he asks in the nonchalant tone of someone used to dealing with about fifteen levels of irrationality before breakfast.

'Yes,' Stiles grumbles irritably, looking down at his sneakers.

Derek rolls up the fabric of his sleeve so it won't get in Stiles' way and puts more weight on the table, leaning closer for Stiles' inspection. Stiles looks up, momentarily thrown off guard by Derek suddenly occupying his personal space. He regains his footing quickly, probing gently at the wounds to make sure nothing's caught in them before wiping all three of them down with the stinging pad. Derek doesn't make a sound, just tenses up, and Stiles mutters out a hasty, 'Sorry about that. Ordinary mortal healing methods aren't exactly gentle.'

'You think werewolf healing isn't painful?' Derek asks, catching his eye for a brief moment before Stiles looks back down at his arm. He rubs the antibiotic cream down into the tears, then caps off the bottle and reaches for a wide roll of white gauze, wiping the excess blood from Derek's arm before wrapping the fabric around his bicep three times. Stiles secures it with the kind of tape that doesn't screw around and smooths down the edges, realising belatedly that he's been _stroking Derek Hale's arm,_ oh my GOD.

He steps back, heart pounding, and nearly trips over his own feet as he replaces the items in the medical kit. Stiles glances back up, looking around for a trashcan to toss the used wipe and packaging, and Derek kicks one out from under the table. 'Thanks,' Derek says, comparing the way Stiles' heart had beat slowly, normally while he was working, and the flustered sounds now crowding his hearing.

It takes Derek a moment, but he realizes that this is what Stiles _does_. He finds the information, he improves the plans, he thinks of last minute details and eleventh hour saves and does it all without a bit of gratitude. He bandages every one up after, as best he can, even when he hasn't been invited and when he can't - when he can't find the missing parts, can't make that watch tick again, he grieves, just as much as the rest of them. Stiles really could have been the first member of Peter's pack, and Derek suddenly can't find the right mental compartment to lock away gratitude.

'I think I'm going to go grab another shirt,' Derek murmurs, more to himself than anyone else.

'Try to find one that wouldn't fit in at a Slayer concert in 1993,' Stiles offers unhelpfully behind him as he ascends the stairs.

'Aw,' Peter coos as Derek rounds the corner of the top floor. 'Has the big bad wolf finished playing doctor?' Peter sits in a chair between two beds, each one occupied by a nearly comatose werewolf, sleeping off the after effects of the full moon and their bodily injuries. Derek flicks him off and digs around in a plastic milk crate until he finds a simple black shirt that _isn't_ full of holes, not probably, and slips it on over his head as he shuffles back down the stairs.

Stiles mouth does _not_ hang open, and his teenaged hormones absolutely do not spiral out of control at the sight of those perfect abdominal muscles and the thick line of hair leading below Derek's waistline. Not in anyway. Whatsoever. He would swear to it in open court, and then promptly be arrested for perjury.

'As long as you're here, you want a cup of coffee?' Derek asks, his feet taking the last few steps at a jump and Stiles' face pretends to be lit up for a perfectly valid reason. It has nothing to do with the way Derek's new shirt fits in all the right angles and the faded batman logo visible across the front.

'Oh please _god_ , yes.' Stiles nearly bounces over to the kitchen counter, eagerly awaiting a warm mug of steaming wakefulness. 'I have to be at school in little under an hour.' Derek shakes his head, and wonders how the kid keeps it together any better than the rest of them. Maybe he doesn't, and he's just taken their cue to hide it equally as well.

'You said you had something else you wanted to talk to me about,' Derek reminds him, pacing across the dusty floorboards to the sofa. He sits on one end, Stiles on the other, and Stiles racks his brain, his lips twitching until his tongue slips out between them and Derek decides to look down at the rugs while he waits.

The circuit finally connects in his brain and Stiles jumps up from the couch, shouting, 'Witches!'

Derek blinks, grateful that Stiles' mug had been cooling on a stack of old fruit crates beside the sofa arms. 'Witches,' he responds. 'You knocked on my door at 5:30 in the morning to talk to me about witches in Beacon Hills.' For once in his life, Derek had managed to reach a point where he didn't think anything could surprise him anymore, but according to Stiles, he was wrong. Of course.

'This girl I knew, all right, back when my mom – they were friends, our moms, is what I'm trying to say, and she invited me to her birthday party last week, and -' Stiles face flushes, his heart rate stuttering. Stiles liked this girl. Derek stares down into his coffee, wondering why that made his fingers twitchy around the ceramic.

'We were in the wine cellar, ah, picking out a bottle of wine, because what would else would anyone be doing in a wine cellar in the middle of the night?' Derek remains quiet, remembering his own teenaged fumbles at romance. Before Kate, before everything went to hell and then came back. 'And I – I ran back upstairs, just for a minute, and when I came back Heather was gone. Just, vanished, like she'd never been there at all, and she never showed back up at her own party.' Stiles looks down at his hands, his lips pressing together so hard they've gone white.

'The basement window was open. I should have gone outside, I should have looked, but then Lydia and Allison showed up and you know the four of us aren't exactly the Scooby Gang these days. I figured that Heather was just - playing a trick on me,' he admits with a bounce of his head. 'Good old Stiles, always there for a laugh.' He turns his head away, burying his face in his coffee, and Derek laces his fingers together across his knees.

'Then Scott's mom snuck me into the morgue tonight - well, I guess, last night – is it the next day until you've slept?' He questions Derek as if honestly expecting him to know the answer, and Derek slowly shakes his head, not understanding the point. 'All right,' Stiles rushes on. 'So, last night I got _way_ too close a look at that lifeguard's body, and he wasn't killed by any wolf.' Derek sits up, suddenly on point, and the amount of police dog jokes Stiles is resisting grows exponentially with each passing second.

'He was strangled by a ligature,' Stiles explains with a perfectly straight face, and since when did he have to try so hard to not laugh in the face of heinous crime scene details? 'Like a tight rope or a garotte, but if they used piano string I'm betting it was below A440 because the lines weren't deep enough into the skin and that's probably not what actually killed them.'

'Stiles,' Derek muses over the lip of his mug. 'Why do you know things like that?'

'I've seen every episode of Law & Order' Stiles answers, waving Derek's question away with his hand. 'Look, it doesn't matter. After these nutjobs had their weird strangulation party - and not like that, I don't mean - you know what, nevermind.' Stiles closes his eyes for a moment before reopening them. 'After  _that,_  they bashed the back of his head in, and when they finally decided to get serious, they just slashed the poor kid's throat.'

'And this leads back to witches, how, exactly?' Derek manages to ask, draining his mug and rising to fill another from the pot.

'Because,' Stiles answers more slowly this time. 'There was a second body in the morgue, and another girl's gone missing. The lifeguard was wearing one of those promise rings, you know, some commitment to hold onto their virginity or – or whatever,' Stiles finishes up rapidly, watching the bones shift in his bare feet as Derek makes his way back to the couch.

'Heather – ' Stiles breaks off clearing his throat and taking a sip of coffee. 'My friend from the party, the girl who disappeared. She was on the second slab.' His hands close tight around the coffee mug, trying to force warmth into his fingers through induction and sheer force of will. 'She – she was still a virgin, too.'

Derek decides not to ask the obvious question, curling his toes against the rough floorboards. He wants to reach out and ruffle Stiles' hair, now that it's grown out enough to make that a viable option. He also knows about three different reasons why he shouldn't, and keeps his hands to himself. 'The third girl?' he asks neutrally, pretending not to notice Stiles' obvious distress about having recently seen the corpse of a girl he might have been getting frisky with a few days before.

'I heard something on my dad's police scanner this morning about a female body in the woods. I don't know if there's a connection, but if there is -' Derek rises to his feet, grabbing a pair of boots and a jacket.

'Derek, listen to me, these aren't just murders, they're -'

'Sacrifices,' the two of them answer in unison.

'Exactly!' Stiles answers, throwing his hands wide at the acknowledgment of his neural connections. 'But you can't just go out there, man,' he cautions. 'It's swarming with cops, investigating the scene!'

'Haven't you got just enough time to get to school, assuming that junk heap of yours even starts?' Derek asks with a smirk, grabbing his keys and a pair of sunglasses from the counter. Stiles frowns as Derek paces toward the door, leaving him behind and the tiniest bit adrift in his wake.

'Or you could give me a ride to the opposite side of town instead of getting arrested, like a decent human being. Wolf. Wolf-being,' Stiles hurls after him as the door shuts in his face. 'Fine, I see how it is. Go muck up a crime scene, see how far that gets you. Go screwing around with witches sacrificing virgins for god only knows what. It's probably not to summon a freaking _UNICORN_!' he yells into the silence. 'And I'm not your Robin, you ungrateful ass,' he tells the back of the closed door, for all the good it does him.

'You know I can hear you perfectly well without shattering my ear drums,' Peter comments from above Stiles' head.

'Ok one, they'd heal in about three seconds,' Stiles retorts, 'and two, you can eavesdrop on me from about three blocks away if you're so interested, graveyard boy.' His shoes squeak across the floorboard and he glances up in what he assumes is Peter's direction. 'You know every time I make a headshot in Dead Island, I visualize your face?'

'Fair enough,' drifts lazily down the stairs, and Stiles shuffles around, making sure he hasn't forgotten anything. He grabs his jacket and turns back for his Medical Kit that now looks so ridiculous, a violently clean shade of white resting amongst the rusted steel and burnt ochre light flooding the loft.

Of course Derek didn't need his help. None of them ever did, except when they _really_ did, and by then Stiles was usually pretty busy fighting for his own life, too. He digs through Derek's cabinets, the paint stripped and peeling until he finds an understated but clearly expensive travel mug that certainly doesn't belong the Alpha. Stiles pours the rest of the coffee directly into it, sealing it closed. Fuck Derek and his undead uncle both, they owed him that much.

Witches, Stiles thinks shaking his head as he kicks the door shut behind him. First wolves biting his best friend, then a secret society of hunters, followed up by a brainwashed lizard man, and now a goddamned coven of murderous _witches._ If things get any worse, Stiles promises himself as hops inside his Jeep and gives her the usual morning pep talk; if they actually get worse, he is _so_ moving to Forks.

**Author's Note:**

> I wasn't going to write this, but iliadawry convinced me. You can all blame her.


End file.
